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This is a ~1 hour talk and discussion, comprising part 1 of a conversation with a really interesting young neuroscientist, as well as friend, collaborator, and our Center member, Nicolas Rouleau ( Nic goes over unconventional aspects of neuroscience touching on free will, cybernetics, consciousness, and a lot more. We start a discussion which is continued in part 2. For more information: Nic's website: X account: @DrNRouleau Recent papers to check out: Sellar, E.P., Rouleau, N. (In Review). A cybernetic framework for synthetic biological intelligence in the era of neural tissue engineering. Preprint doi: 10.31234/osf.io/md2wf_v1. Kansala, C., Cicek, E., Nkansah-Okoree, V., Golding, A., Murugan, N.J., Rouleau, N. (In Review). Superstitious conditioning forms the experience of free will under causal determinism. Preprint doi: 10.31234/osf.io/fk3yt_v2. Roskies, A. & Rouleau, N. (Forthcoming, In Press). Research on brain organoids should prioritize questions of agency, not consciousness. AJOB Neuroscience. Rouleau, N. & Levin, M. (In Press). Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments. Philosophical Transactions: A. Preprint doi:10.1098/rsta.2025.0082. Rouleau, N., Levin, M. (2024), Discussions of machine versus living intelligence need more clarity, Nature Machine Intelligence, doi:10.31219/osf.io/gz3km Rouleau, N., and Levin, M. (2023), The Multiple Realizability of Sentience in Living Systems and Beyond, eNeuro, 10(11), doi:10.1523/eneuro.0375-23.2023 Rouleau, N., Cairns, D. M., Rusk, W., Levin, M., and Kaplan, D. (2021), Learning and synaptic plasticity in 3D bioengineered neural tissues Neuroscience Letters, 750: 135799

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Free will, minds, transmission

(26:52) Material brains after death

(31:18) Defining free will experience

(38:00) Long-term agency and algorithms

(49:35) Causality, math, and consciousness

(57:33) Transmissive consciousness and information

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Transcript

This transcript is automatically generated; we strive for accuracy, but errors in wording or speaker identification may occur. Please verify key details when needed.

[00:00] Nicolas Rouleau: Yeah, thanks for inviting me, Mike. My name is Nick Rulo. I am an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and an affiliate scientist at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. And today we're going to talk about some interesting topics. And I've put them under the umbrella of some thoughts on the mind as material. We'll be talking about free will, cybernetics, and this idea of transmissive consciousness. And I'll try to run through these slides pretty quickly because I'm excited to get to the discussion. So these are the three ideas that I sort of want to touch on today. How do we explain the experience of free will? What is a mind and how can we build it? And is the brain a transmissive organ? So the brain is a complex object. It's probably the most complex object we know of in the universe, but they are not impossible to understand. They're not uniquely composed, and they don't require any magical or non-physical mechanisms or new physics. I think that everything we've seen so far in terms of functions of the brain can be explained basically by the physics that we already have and mechanisms that we already know of. And then, of course, we can build on top of that, but I don't think it needs any special properties beyond what we're already investigating in biology and engineering. So I'll start with the first question, which is, how do we explain the experience of free will? And I'll start this by just sort of talking a little bit about the story that we've been sold about free will, which is that we've been sold the story that the brain makes decisions. So there are these things called intentions and desires that are said to initiate a sort of causal chain that leads to actions. We're often told that we plan and we organize events. And then you can look at brain imaging and see that there are certain areas of the brain that light up, demonstrate activity, either through fMRI or EEG, and those correlate with actions, but they seem to precede the actions. And then, of course, there are these things called decisions, which correspond roughly to the idea that you can actually select options in the world in terms of what you're going to do. And basically the story is that you're the conscious author of your actions. You get to make decisions and those decisions have impacts in the world and you really are making it happen in a conscious and intentive way. And the evidence for this is not great. So if you look at the neuroscientific literature over the past 20, 30 years, you'll find a whole bunch of evidence in the opposite direction, which basically suggests, you know, the totality of it suggests that we are more or less witnesses to actions that are happening. We seem to be conscious of decisions after they're made, which to me means that the decision isn't being made by the conscious agent. But of course, there are different ways to interpret all these results. I included one study here on the far right, which I think is a bit of a nail in the coffin for an idea of free will, just from the neuroscientific perspective. And I could talk a little bit about that, which is basically if you stimulate the brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation, if you stimulate the right side of the brain, you can get people to make left-sided decisions, like press a left button more often than the right side. And if you stimulate the opposite side, you can get the opposite reaction. Basically, you can determine people's decisions. But when you ask them why they made those decisions, they'll tell you that they wanted to make the decisions, which is really interesting. It's a preservation of the experience of free will, even though experimentally, you know that you're determining the outcome of the task.

[04:28] Nicolas Rouleau: So I think this is all really interesting. And there are different ways to interpret these studies, of course, and many will disagree with my conclusions. But I basically think that this is interesting but irrelevant. And that's because I think that the question is not posed correctly and has been pursued incorrectly. The only evidence that we have for free will is the subjective experience of free will. And Bertrand Russell gave us this great analogy of the teapot, which he applied to different kinds of arguments, but here I think it applies to free will. And basically the idea is that, if I make the claim that there's a teapot that's orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, it would be very difficult for you to actually measure that or disconfirm it. But actually, the burden of proof is on me to demonstrate that the teapot exists, not on you to demonstrate that the teapot doesn't exist. And what we've seen in the neuroscientific literature is that the burden of proof has been shifted to basically those who don't think free will exists. And there's a constant sort of struggle to develop experiments that continuously demonstrate that we're not the author of our actions. So assuming causal determinism is true and there really are no uncaused causes, I think that all we need to explain really is the experience of free will. And we can even make the assumption at the outset, whether it's true or not, we can make the assumption that we live in a causally deterministic universe, the brain is no different, thoughts and behaviors are basically the products of a chain of causes. And so really all we have left to explain is why people have this incredible experience of free will. And it is a very common experience. So it sort of demands an explanation. And the answer that we put forward in a recent preprint is the idea that basically free will is explained by superstitious conditioning. If you look at the original studies by B.F. Skinner in the mid-20th century, he did some incredible experiments where he demonstrated that you could basically get pigeons to have superstitious beliefs. And this is a form of learning called non-contingent reinforcement. So if you have a pigeon in a Skinner box and you make it so that when they peck a lever, they get some food, they'll peck the lever and they'll get the food. But if you make it so that they get food regardless of what they do every 10 seconds, 30 seconds, what ends up happening is the pigeon gets reinforced for the behavior that it was displaying right before it got the food. So whatever it was doing right before it got the food, now that behavior is reinforced. And so it will continuously display that behavior. And you can see naturalistic examples of this throughout history. So for example, rainmaking behavior, people doing rain dances and things like this to bring about a change in weather, to address a famine. So that is totally understandable in the context of superstitious conditioning. Basically, humans are stressed by either a famine or a drought. They engage in different kinds of behaviors to try to remove that stress or avoid that stress. And finally, as time goes on and they become more desperate, they do things that are more and more strange and incoherent, which is what most animals do. Animals will behave randomly until they get the response they desire. And whatever they're doing right before it rains, and eventually it will rain, whatever they're doing right before it rains gets reinforced. And so then whatever behavior was happening right before it rained, whether it's an animal sacrifice or a specific kind of dance, that gets reinforced. More of that over time. So basically, that's what we think free will is, and I'll get to the model of how that works. But this basically is saying that free will is a learned phenomenon.

[08:57] Nicolas Rouleau: And what we find is that learning, superstition, and delusions, which are all related to one another, are actually related specifically through dopaminergic pathways in the brain, the mesolimbic pathways in particular. You find that in, for example, Parkinson's disease, among people with Parkinson's disease, superstitious beliefs are very low. I don't know why I've got the arrows backwards here. So in Parkinson's disease, where dopaminergic activity is very low, superstitious beliefs are also low. In schizophrenia, superstitious beliefs are very high, and that's a disorder characterized by excess dopamine activity. If you give people with schizophrenia a dopamine blocker, they end up having less superstitious and delusional beliefs. So basically, we think that it's a dopaminergic phenomenon, which is actually in line with the literature, the neuroscience literature around decision-making, which has focused on dopamine for the past 20 years. And the sensible question you might ask is, well, why is this? Why do we have this experience of desiring things and then planning and organizing? Because people really do report these kinds of experiences. And basically the answer we've come up with is that we think that you're predicting it. And because you have access to the content of your brain, whether conscious or unconscious, you are constantly forming predictions about what will happen next. And this is consistent with an active inference model of how the brain works. And basically, because you have access to what's happening next, when your predictions are realized, that actually reinforces whatever it is that you were predicting. And if you look at the model that we generated here, basically the idea is that whatever activity is happening in the premotor cortex and any area of the brain that signals to the motor cortex, and the motor cortex, by the way, signals directly out to the spinal cord into the muscles. So if you just stimulate the motor cortex, people move their bodies. So anything that's happening before the motor cortex is called premotor. But we think that that's basically a predictive, it's a predictive substrate, and it is anticipating what will happen next. And when that action is actually realized, the anticipation is reinforced. And because of the temporal contiguity, because prediction is always coming before realization, you have this automatic reinforcement of the prediction. And because it's embodied and because you witness it as your body in motion, there's a self-attribution. So you're attributing the causality to yourself. And if it's a learned phenomenon, it should extinguish when you have examples where a prediction is made, but then it's not realized. And we do actually have examples of this. So you can condition individuals to not feel free. When you do this in animals, it's called learned helplessness. So if you have a dog in a Skinner box with two compartments, a shocked floor and another shocked floor. And it can choose between these two compartments. And whatever it does, it will always get punished. The dog will eventually stop avoiding the punishment and will simply sit still. And you get different kinds of versions of this classic experiment where eventually, if it doesn't matter what you do, you are constantly getting a negative reinforcement. You can get basically the opposite of what we're suggesting, which is you get a complete lack of free will or the experience of free will. You don't think you're the author of your actions anymore. And there are clinical versions of this like avolition that you see in clinical populations. So why isn't it usually extinguished? It's because the way that the neural circuitry works in the brain is that premotor activity always precedes motor activity.

[13:25] Nicolas Rouleau: You always have this prefrontal cortex activity that's happening before the motor cortices are activated. And so whatever predictive state is occurring is always happening beforehand. And that temporal contiguity, one before the other, means that you will always reinforce the prediction. So I'm happy to talk about this a little bit more, but I'll move on to the next idea here. So the next idea is what is a mind and can we build it? And this line of my research has very much to do with this idea of minds being much less complex than we give them credit for. They look incredibly complex, but basically what we have in the form of animal brains and minds is something that has been built up over billions of years from tissues and cells and the kinds of cognitive systems that can exist at smaller scales and at different time spans. But the basic building blocks of a cognitive system can be described using things like Breitenberg vehicles and basic cybernetic loops. And I think that cybernetics actually provides a great way to approach these problems. And I love this Breitenberg quote, which is the idea of uphill analysis and downhill invention. So if you're trying to understand the brain, you can pick apart all the different pathways and test everything until you're blue in the face. And you will eventually get answers, and these answers will tell you about the cognitive circuitry of the system. Alternatively, another way to understand the brain and another way to understand cognitive systems is to actually build them and then try to understand the thing that you built and map that onto the kinds of behavioral phenotypes that you see in nature. So we can engineer these miniature brains in a dish using pluripotent stem cells and primary neurons, and we can put them together in different kinds of combinations, controlling how many layers there are, what kinds of spatial characteristics they have, whether it's a co-culture, monoculture. And this is some of the work that Mike and I did, where we found that if you create these miniaturized brains in a dish, you can get them to learn, you can get them to display these non-associative learning responses that also have spontaneous recovery. So these very basic responses that you can see. So the question is, are they capable of more complex cognitive phenomena? And we now use a single-cell-resolution microelectrode array. And what you're looking at here are action potentials within a network being displayed at very high resolution, resolution of about 10 microns. And it turns out that if you disembody neurons, if you remove them from a body and put them in a dish, as we've been doing in biology for over a century, they behave very differently in terms of their physiology than they would if they were actually hooked up to a body. Disembodied neurons display these stereotyped paroxysmal electrical discharges, this kind of burst-firing phenotype. And that's viewed in the context of electrophysiology as like a good sign. It's like, well, the cells are firing, great. But if that was happening in a body, we would call it a seizure. And in fact, it displays all the basic characteristics of a seizure. So these are basically cells in a dish that are aberrantly firing. They have this kind of seizure phenotype. And it turns out that if you just give them feedback, either feedback about their own activity, or you inject small amounts of current into the network, just stochastic inputs, that totally normalizes. So as long as the neural network is getting some kind of input from an environment, let's say, something that isn't itself, it tends to normalize. It tends to become much more like the kinds of neural activity you would see in a body, which I think is just fascinating and actually coincides with all these interesting things that you can do with neurons when you give them feedback. They seem to be able to learn autonomously. They seem to be able to problem solve, make decisions as far as that word means anything after the previous topic. But yeah, an embodied neuron is a very different thing than a disembodied neuron. And that should be pretty unsurprising because, of course, brains co-evolved with bodies. A brain is just part of an organism.

[17:54] Nicolas Rouleau: And when these systems are functioning together and navigating the world, they behave incredibly different than when you separate them and have them interact with the same environment. So using closed-loop feedback to try to investigate questions of consciousness and intelligence and attention and all these other cognitive capacities, I think is a really important frontier. And it's something that we're interested in as a lab and looking at. So we're creating these modular brains in a dish, and we're doing some interesting things. One of the things we're doing right now is we're trying to actually bring three-dimensional cell culture and two-dimensional cell culture together into a kind of layered system where different parts of the network can function as reservoirs and as readouts. And if you do this, in the context of embodied cognition, the idea is that you're actually giving the system different kinds of cognitive resources to draw on to solve problems, perform computations. And what we're really interested in is whether, giving a two-dimensional monolayer access to a three-dimensional neural network, for example, whether that confers some kind of enhanced cognitive properties. Do they learn faster? Does it take fewer trials to learn the same task or solve the same puzzle? So that's some of the things we're doing. And I'll move on to the last topic because I would like to just get into the discussion. And this is the topic of the brain as a potentially transmissive organ. And this idea sort of starts with what I was doing in grad school. So in grad school, I was working with Michael Persinger on the idea of brain electromagnetic interactions. And I was reading about William James's research and his thoughts on consciousness from the turn of the century, late 1800s. And he gave this great speech on human immortality, where he asked the question, what would be necessary for consciousness to survive bodily death? And basically the answer that he came up with, which I think is the right way to approach this scientifically, is the idea that if the brain is a productive organ, if consciousness is just a property of what the brain is doing, as such, neurons firing signals to one another, be they electrical, chemical, or a combination, if that is really the sufficient property that either realizes consciousness or from which consciousness emerges, then basically, you cannot, consciousness can't survive death because when the brain dies and it decays, consciousness would dissolve with the matter that gave rise to it. But he proposed that there are other kinds of functions, other kinds of functional categories that could exist that if it was discovered that the brain was within this category of function, that consciousness could survive bodily death. And he proposes transmissive function as the main function that would allow for the survival of consciousness. And what is transmissive function? Well, it looks a lot like these two examples. So there's the example of the pipe organ, for example. So there's air in the room and the air isn't music. It's not sound. But when that air is sifted through various compartments and compressed and changed, it can become these oscillating pressure waves, which are experienced as music. And in the same way, when you shine light through a prism, that light, when it's split into its constituent colors, the colors are not a result of the prism producing anything. The prism is simply filtering the light. And you wouldn't ask the question, well, where was the color in the prism before it was filtered by the prism? These are sort of nonsensical questions in the context of transmissive function. And so these are some of the examples that William James gave to describe what transmissive function is. And I think it was in 2021 or 2022, I wrote an essay that was a response to a challenge by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies that had the same question. What is the best scientific explanation, the best scientific evidence for the existence of consciousness after bodily death? And those who produced essays in this competition often drew on examples like, well, we can look at things like mediumship and we can look at post-mortem apparitions, like the existence of ghosts and things like this. I thought that William James basically got the question right. And so it was just a matter of identifying what kinds of scientific evidence existed that could be in support of the idea of transmissive consciousness.

[22:22] Nicolas Rouleau: And what I identified was that basically the brain's interactions with electromagnetic fields constitute a genuine transmissive function of the brain. These are transductions and transmissions that are occurring without an intermediate sensory modality. They're happening directly at the level of the brain. They're changing brain function and they're changing experience. So I'll get into a couple examples of this. So there's evidence, for example, that the brain coheres in real time with oscillations of Earth's magnetic field. Everybody knows that Earth has a magnetic field. That magnetic field is generated by basically molten iron moving around in our core. You can see Earth's magnetic field when you have coronal mass ejections and basically the particles from the sun are dancing at the poles of Earth's magnetic field as the aurora borealis. But we know that those same perturbations of Earth's magnetic field distort all sorts of things like flight patterns in birds and different kinds of swarming behaviors in insects and so on. Well, it turns out that it also influences human activity. I'll get to that a little bit later. But one of the things that happens is that Earth's magnetic field is not static. It actually oscillates. And the reason it oscillates is that around the Earth right now and continuously, there are lightning discharges between the ionosphere and the surface. And these lightning discharges actually oscillate Earth's magnetic field with a modal frequency of about 7.83 Hertz. This is known as Schumann resonance. And this oscillation actually shows up on EEG and coheres in real time with EEG. So if you look at the brains of, you bring people into the lab, look at their brains in terms of EEG rhythms, you'll find that their brain activity actually coheres in real time with Schumann resonance measured as Earth's oscillating magnetic field. When Earth's magnetic field is oscillating during moments of perturbation, like when there's coronal mass ejections, there are more seizures that you see in psychiatric inpatients. So humans are affected just like other animals. We're really no different. And they also have sort of esoteric experiences around times of geomagnetic fluctuation. If you take a person and put them in a Faraday cage where you've blocked out the electromagnetic environment, you find that their brain rhythms change as well, specifically within the alpha band, which is around 10 cycles per second firing frequency, which is a brain rhythm associated with inhibition of various brain areas. And in grad school, I basically demonstrated that if you expose postmortem brain tissue, these are preserved brain specimens, if you expose them to electrical current or electromagnetic fields and you measure voltage fluctuations in the tissues, the different areas of the cortex filter those electromagnetic signals differently. So if you inject current into the parahippocampal gyrus, for example, it will amplify theta rhythms more than it will amplify beta rhythms, for example. So there's a certain kind of frequency selectivity. And basically, I think this is a material property of the brain. I don't think there's anything magical happening here. I think that the brain has material properties in addition to its biological living properties. And that the parahippocampal gyrus is one of these areas that has this really interesting sort of geometry, which could make it a great candidate for studying in terms of brain material and the brain material's interactions with electromagnetic fields. It could explain, for example, why the temporal lobes in particular are so sensitive to electromagnetic fields and why research involving brain exposures to electromagnetic fields are very often dominated by experiences that are consistent with activations of the temporal lobes, like hearing sounds, seeing colors, having these kinds of visceral experiences, not on the outside of the body, but on the inside of the body, and things like that. Okay, I'm going to end it there. This is my lab. Shout out to my institutional affiliations and funders, and I'll wrap it up there.

[26:52] Michael Levin: Super. Thanks very much. Lots to chew on. Let's see. I have a bunch of questions. Let's start with just the very last thing you said, and then we'll circle around the back. So isn't it amazing that even after these brains that you were looking at, formaldehyde fixation, formalin, something like that? I mean, that's a lot to ask, right? Even if the basic finding is true that, okay, after death, they can still respond to, like, let's say all that is true, you might still think that, my God, fixing all of the aldehydes and everything, like, good luck. Any thoughts on why it's still able to do that?

[27:38] Nicolas Rouleau: Yeah, I think you're totally right. So when you fix the brain with an aldehyde-based fixative, you get all these sulfide bonds between all the proteins. And that's what's great about it, because when you put it under a microscope, even 20, 30, 40 years later, you have this incredible microarchitecture that's preserved. So there's no chance that whatever it is that we're observing has anything to do with biology in the sort of sense of there's no physiological response here happening. I think that it's a material property and it's a material property that is at least not fully attenuated by aldehyde fixation. It's basically happening at the level of the tissue, like conductors and insulators and capacitors.

[28:26] Michael Levin: I mean, that's just wild, right? I can absolutely buy that there are these important material properties, but you would think that the fixation would change all those, right? You know, that's one of these things that strikes me as amazing that it actually works. The other one that always gets me is general anesthesia, right? If somebody said to me that, okay, we're going to come and decouple all your electrical synapses, but don't worry, afterwards, you'll probably settle in pretty much the same bioelectric state you were in before, I would say not a chance, right? No way. It's just incredible that works.

[29:00] Nicolas Rouleau: We had the same idea. What is it about the fixative? Could the fixative be interfering with this? So we had a follow-up experiment. We actually did publish it. I think it's in the journal Cognitive Neurodynamics in 2017. And what we did was there were a whole bunch of mouse brains that were sitting in fixative for anywhere between one year and 20 years. And basically we just measured all of these and then looked at how the amount of time spent in the fixative and the pH of the fixative changed the way that there were, how it changed voltage fluctuations in the tissues themselves. And there were time-dependent differences. So I have no doubt that the fixative is changing something, but clearly not so much as to destroy any kind of differences between cortical areas, for example.

[29:58] Michael Levin: That's amazing. If that's the case, then presumably we can expect evolution to have taken advantage of this wide range of weird things that can happen to the material and keep certain useful properties.

[30:14] Nicolas Rouleau: Have you ever looked at the shapes of reptile and bird brains?

[30:22] Michael Levin: I mean, I've seen them and I haven't studied them closely. What did you see?

[30:26] Nicolas Rouleau: Well, it's interesting. They have these really interesting sandwich-like properties where you have three layers and the layers are alternating conductors and insulators. And we actually have that as a vestigial part of our brain anatomy in certain parts of our brain, like the hippocampus. The hippocampus basically is a three-layered cortex. And we eventually have developed more layers as we went along. But yeah, the birds and the reptilian brain, they have this really interesting sandwich structure, which I always thought was really interesting from a materials perspective.

[31:18] Michael Levin: Let me circle back around to the beginning. Let's start with the free will stuff. Do you want to give a definition of free will and in particular, do you think the word is completely useless and should be gone, or is there some useful sense of it that does some useful work?

[31:39] Nicolas Rouleau: I think that, so if I'm giving my definition of free will, I would say that it is a subjective experience of control. And if I go a little bit further, I'll say that it's a misattribution of causality. Because I don't think that you actually do have control. I think you're witnessing your predictions realized. What most people mean by free will is the ability to author their own actions. And I just don't think that that's a thing that really exists. I'm super curious. I'd love to speak to, I wonder what you think about this. Why do you, what is it about brain activity preceding actions that we think has anything to do with something like intention or planning.

[32:35] Michael Levin: Yeah, I mean, without getting into my whole story of free will, I do have a theory on why it's a pervasive way of thinking. So imagine the earliest, simplest life forms, right? Because you're living in a highly energy- and time-constrained environment, meaning that everything's expensive, time is really expensive, food is expensive, what you can't afford to do is be a Laplacian demon. In other words, you can't say, I'm just going to pay attention to all the microstates of every ion and everything else around me, and that'll be my story. You'll be dead and eaten in no time. So what you have to do, what you're forced to do, is to coarse grain. You're forced to take ensembles of things and say, I'm just going to call all this stuff back. And as you do that, one really powerful way of doing that is to have models of agents doing things. So in other words, it's not just a bunch of random stuff that happens, but the way I'm going to coarse grain it is like, here's this thing, I'm going to call it a predator, I'm going to call it food, I'm going to call it a mate, like whatever it is. And I'm going to tell a story about this thing doing something. A very nice way of compressing what's going on, and it gives me the ability to make fast decisions under limited information. Well, if you do that long enough, eventually you turn that on yourself and you say, wait a minute, I'm an agent that does things. And so I would, without going into whether I think it's actually real or not, I would simply say that here's a theorem that one might put forward, that any being that arises under resource constraint is going to believe in free will. I'm not saying it has it, I'm not saying it doesn't have it. I'm saying that I think that kind of origin really induces and facilitates these kind of models. And then it makes sense to apply that to yourself, right? So I think that's okay. We could tell that story for the origin of it. But I wonder, so let's run with your definition of this misattribution of authorship. What do you think are the implications of how, what does that mean for how we should, or can conduct ourselves? So, somebody doesn't know that theory, then they heard you, they found you very convincing. What happens after that? And I remember being at the Danish pastry house with Dan Dennett, and the waitress came over and she's like, Oh, you know, Professor Dennett, what will you have? And he's looking at the menu, he's like, Well, let me see. I'm like, Dan. What are you doing? Are you going to choose a soup? That can't be right. So, but neither can we sort of sit there and just wait to see what the universe has in store. What do you think about that? Like if you find that convincing, how do you navigate life, or do you?

[35:38] Nicolas Rouleau: Yeah, I think that I think you can have intellectual positions about how the world really works and then you can have the way that you privately conduct yourself in your day-to-day life. So when I'm interacting with others and when I'm navigating the world on a day-to-day basis, I do generally just move around with the assumption that everybody has free will, even though when I, and it's consistent with what you're describing, like the model that you were describing, which, by the way, I think is also consistent with the animism that you see in young children, like thinking that trees are alive, but that trees are agents that, like everyone else, like the humans that they interact with. And I think that every now and then, what often happens in my life is, like, I'll perceive someone to have slighted me or I'll perceive, like, someone to have done something, quote unquote, wrong. And I think my first knee-jerk reaction is to say, well, what a terrible thing to do. This person really is awful. But then I realize, like, very quickly, because I have, like, the intellectual position that the decisions they're making are the only decisions they could have made given all the preconditions. And even aside from that, like, the whole idea that this person is the author of all their actions and this can be completely held responsible for whatever it is they're doing is just not right. And so I try to, if I reflect about how other people behave and how I behave, I can often forgive people much more readily because I kind of view people's behavior as, like, no different than the weather or no different than how you would expect a crocodile to behave if you stuck your hand in their cage. What happens is the thing that was most likely to happen right then and there because of all the preconditions. And blame seems to be, I don't know, just a kind of vestige of something that's just not true. How do you navigate the world with this?

[38:00] Michael Levin: So I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is, I do think that it's a useful heuristic too. So what I try to do is, in the example that you gave, when somebody does something bad, I usually go to the Sapolsky version and say, well, there's a long history that led that person to this. What are you going to do? On the other hand, when somebody does something amazing, right, or some act of courage or generosity or whatever, I usually flip the other way and I say, fantastic, you get full credit, like that was your magical inner nature doing that, right? I think that's fine and that's helpful. But also, my story of free will is not as deflationary, I think, and we can sort of, if we have time, we can talk about what that is. I do think that though, on a short time scale, like in these decision, if you're looking at individual decisions, that's not where you're going to find it. So at the micro scale, I really don't think, if you're looking at the micro scale of what's going on, you're going to find a bunch of causes that got you there, and that's fine. What I do think is a useful sense of free will is the long-term extended showing up. And what I mean is, if you apply consistent effort, whether that be education, meditation, anger management, therapy, I don't know what it is, whatever it is, if you're applying consistent long-term efforts so that your future reactions, instinctual though they may be at the time, but you're biasing the distribution through consistent applied effort, you're biasing your likely future behaviors. So you're not free for current you, but you have some freedom of what future you is going to look like. And I realize that then you say, but even that effort is, whether you can apply that effort or not, caused by something. I get all that. I see it as a kind of like summing infinitesimals under a curve in calculus. Like each thing is, yes, it's infinitely small, but altogether it actually adds up to a non, you know, to a non-zero thing. So I think that's a useful version of free will, where you say the freedom you have is not what's happening right now, right? Past you, in fact, a whole series of past you have done all kinds of stuff to get you here. Don't worry about any of that. Look forward, right? You can't do anything about any of that, but you can, although you can actually, I think, tell a more adaptive story about what happened. You can flip those stories around. But what you can do is now do the nice thing for future you and do whatever it takes to get yourself so that you're doing something in the future that's more, you know, more aligned with your values and things like that. So I think it has a more useful version that way, because what's your take on this, with that kind of view of it? Do you think the crisis of meaning is an issue? The kinds of, do you know what I'm talking about? Like the basic, right, where neuroscience and physics and evolutionary theory have really sort of taken the rug out from a lot of things that we might want in our relationship with others, but also in a kind of a social level. How do you see this story fitting into that?

[41:21] Nicolas Rouleau: Yeah, that's so. I think that that's maybe one of the most relevant questions here because you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do with this? And I just think that this is one of these genuinely dangerous ideas because, and we talk about this a little bit in the preprint, but you could dedicate a whole research program to this, and people have. But when you tell people that their decisions are determined, they tend to cheat more on tests. They tend to slight people around them and undercut people. And that's concerning because if it's true that in fact your decisions are determined and really the only barrier between social anarchy and social order or harmony, however you want to characterize it, is really just people's belief in free will, from a social benefits side of things, you really do want to preserve that for the benefit of the world and for the species. On the other hand, the scientist's job is to figure out what's true and what is a model of the world that best describes it and has best predictive validity and in many cases allows you to control things. I think there are benefits on the side of viewing people's actions as not authored by themselves. For example, you might still have a prison system. When people do things that are harming themselves or others, you still have to remove them from the situation in order to reduce that harm. So quarantine is still a viable solution to the problem of antisocial behavior. But the prison system would look very different. You would basically have people in these boxes, but these boxes would be places of compassion. They'd be places of understanding. They'd be places where essentially you'd be treating people as people who are sick or people who have learned inappropriately maladaptive behaviors. And I think that is a compassionate outcome of really taking it seriously that we are not the authors of our actions. But then again, there's a balance here to be struck. And I don't know, on the balance of all things, whether this would be good or bad for the species.

[44:06] Michael Levin: Yeah. There's a couple of other things. I just mentioned them, and then we don't have to dig into it. But there's a couple of things I think are relevant to this. One is that I actually think that there's a lot of the components of what we mean or what we want to have by free will has to do with causes that are at a higher level than the parts which are sort of underneath them. And from that perspective, I think your first act of free will is basically embryogenesis, right? It's when you've managed to, when the collective of cells begins to acquire goals in a different space, in a large-scale morphous space that the individual cells didn't have. And so you now have this causality at a different level that actually works downwards to bend the option space for the cells. And it makes them do things that they have no idea why or what they're doing. But there's a higher level at which, okay, now there's this larger goal state that we're all working towards. And so on. So I think those kinds of things are important. And the other thing that's interesting is, I think we have a weird new model system for a strange kind of free will, and that model system, I don't know if you've kept up with our stuff, and we'll be a bunch more this spring, but our stuff on the sorting algorithms. So you haven't seen it. It's pretty wild. So basically, like, okay, Dan in his old book on free will made a very sort of powerful analysis where he said, look, we only know of two kinds of things. We know causes, where A is caused by B, and then we know quantum randomness. And neither of those things is what we mean by free will. So then, you know, then that's the end. So I think there's something else going on. And long story short, what we've been looking at are, because I'm interested in the shock value of doing this for extremely simple, minimal models. Once you have something biological, there's always some new mechanism that you haven't found yet. There's going to be some quantum something. There's never an end to it. But what we looked at were very simple computational systems where you can see all the steps. And so we took simple sorting algorithms, like bubble sort. So these are things of five or six lines of code, people have been studying them for 80 years. And we looked at them in a way that basically drops the assumption that we know what they're doing. Because you assume, right, the theory of algorithms is, the whole point of it is the algorithm tells you exactly what you're going to do. And okay, people have studied unpredictability and sort of complexity and things like that. But it turns out that there's something else that comes out of it, which is not just unpredictability or complexity. It's actually things that are recognizable to any behavior scientist.

[46:50] Michael Levin: So it turns out they have delayed gratification. It turns out that they can do some other stuff. I've been calling it these side quests because the algorithm tells you you're going to sort, and it forces you to sort, and yeah, you sort the numbers, but you're also doing this other thing, which I'm not, I won't use your time now to go into it. But it does this other thing where there are no steps in the algorithm for this other thing. They're not there. And so it isn't a miracle in the sense that the CPU is literally only doing the things in the algorithm, right? That part works. But it turns out that our formal model of the algorithm only captures one thing. The thing we are forcing it to do is there. But there's also this other thing, which you can, and probably many, that's just the one we found. There's probably a million others that we just haven't caught yet. That is a kind of, another way to look at it, it's a kind of intrinsic motivation. So it isn't the thing we forced it to do, and it doesn't have anything to do with randomness or it doesn't have a quantum interface, it's a deterministic algorithm. But yet there's this other thing. And I think that if we were looking for something, for like a minimal version of free will, it isn't the thing we forced it to do. Of course, like the mechanism makes it, that's obviously not it. But this other thing that we never asked it to do, that is in fact an easily recognizable, it's basically like homophily, it turns out, it's just like a biological homophily. It turns out that, I don't know where that comes from. And that might be a very minimal model of the kind of thing we're looking at. It's neither the chance nor the necessity. It's the thing that you're doing in between the steps of the algorithm that forces you to do specific, or the rules of physics and chemistry. It's the stuff you do despite the algorithm, right? It's not what the algorithm makes you do. It's the stuff you manage to do despite the algorithm. So I don't know yet. I haven't said, you know, this is like I'm working on a whole thing on free will here, but I haven't said anything about that yet. But I suspect there's something here. And I suspect if something so simple is able to manifest it, I'm sure evolution has like, I exploited the hell out of it, and maybe this is the kind of thing we're looking at. But of course, in biological systems, it's very complex, right? It's hard to prove anything like that. Anyway, so that's kind of how I've been looking at it. But I wonder, I think from what you've described today, it's an interesting mix of views in that, so free will, no, but consciousness, yes. That's kind of interesting, right? You want to talk about that for a second? How do you see that working?

[49:35] Nicolas Rouleau: Well, I just want to say one quick thing about what you were just talking about, because it's fascinating. I think the insight that Darwin had about natural selection and the environment as the selector was an incredibly powerful insight that will continue to be adopted by other areas of study as we trot along in science. And I wonder, if you don't mind, if I could ask you a quick question, so for these algorithms, do you think that if you could account for all of the particles in the universe and their motions and their positions, like Laplace's demon, do you think that you would still find causal chains in those algorithms? Or do you think there's something happening there that's not accounted for by all the parts?

[50:36] Michael Levin: Right. A couple of things, and this could, we could spend hours on this. I'll send you some of the stuff that we've been working on recently. But what I don't think this requires is any weird new physics. I don't think this is an issue of physics. I don't think this is an issue of getting around conservation of mass energy or anything like that. What I think is happening here is something much, much weirder actually, which has to do with the following. And just to be really quick about it, there are certain facts that are not facts of physics. These are things like the specific value of the natural logarithm E, the specific number of Feigenbaum's constant, like that kind of stuff, right? And what I'm impressed by is this feature where wherever you start, whether it be in biology or physics, if you just keep asking why, eventually you end up in the math department, right? So sooner or later, the answer is, oh, because the distribution of primes is like this and not like that, or because the symmetry of this group is this or that, right? Eventually, that's where you end up. So you have this weird thing where it isn't exactly, it isn't that, basically, the explanation for what's going on actually is it takes you out of physicalism, basically. Like I think physicalism is wrong. I think the physical world is simply not closed. It's closed if you want to try for billiard ball causation, then that's all you'll see. Of course, that's all you'll see. But I think that kind of causation is long dead. And I think there's a much more interesting aspect of it where one half of that causal influence are really weird things like mathematical properties and actually some of those properties I think are not simple static things like E and so on. I think they're actually active patterns that we would recognize as kinds of minds. So this is a really weird sort of platonic almost kind of view. But so what I'm thinking is that's going on here is this. It's kind of like if you hear two mathematicians talking and they're sort of, you say, okay, so can you give me an explanation of what happened? You could give an explanation of what all the air molecules were doing. And it's not wrong exactly, but the actual, like the more insightful reason for why things went the way they did is not any of that, right? It's not to be found in the molecules. It's in a completely different space. And eventually you end up in these things that aren't parts of physics at all. So I think that's what's going on here. It's not that these things are breaking physics, although once you go down that road and you ask, okay, what do we get from that space? So we can get like static things like E and so on. Once you start asking that question, I suspect, and we're doing experiments on this now, what you actually get is not static. I think you might get compute out of it. At which point you are going to break, for example, the known sort of relationship between the cost of computing a single bit or erasing, more accurately, a single bit, that kind of stuff. I think that stuff might break, actually. But it's not because it's because I think there's a really weird kind of causation going on. And that's not new physics. That's like already at the time of Pythagoras, if you wanted to know why certain things were happening, the answer was going to be, well, that's how the math shakes out, right?

[54:11] Nicolas Rouleau: No, I think that's totally fair. And it's like the problem of, you know, you have similar problems in consciousness where, what comes to mind is the Zen master coming over to the microphone when asked a very profound question and just tapping the microphone. And it's like, there are things that are ineffable. They can't be described in terms of language. And they just are experiences. And when you translate them into reference out in the world and you point to them, unless you're actually experiencing them as raw data, any representation or symbol that's pointing to it is just not the thing. You're not pointing to the thing itself. You have to go a little bit deeper. And so investigation and describing the world scientifically is a kind of step removed from reality. So yeah, no, it's very interesting. I can't wait to read it. But you asked the question about the free will, no consciousness, yes.

[55:24] Michael Levin: I mean, are we talking an epiphenomenalist position or what's the, how do you put them together?

[55:31] Nicolas Rouleau: Yeah, I just think that, in a nutshell, free will is not something that we ought to spend a lot of time trying to explain. The question of causality is interesting. It's like a question for physics, and I think that if the physicists solve it, we can just apply that broadly. But I think that, in the sense of Bertrand Russell, like I was talking about a little bit earlier, I don't think it makes sense to go down this rabbit hole trying to look for causation and for explanations about how experience maps onto that, because all we really need to do is explain the experience. And to me, what I'm really saying is just consciousness, yes. And that's what it is. And free will is just an experience within consciousness. It's just another experience that you can have that is basically illusory. You're witnessing something that isn't actually happening. And you form a belief about what's actually happening. There really is just a causal chain of events happening, and then your predictions are being realized and you've become, you develop a superstition that is self-referential. You think that you are the author of your own actions, but really what you're just doing is witnessing a body in motion, an organism that is interacting with its environment in predictable ways. So yeah, I just don't think that free will is a coherent idea. And I think that consciousness is really what we have. Although I do think that an external environment does exist. There are some who think that consciousness is all we have and the world is really just a projection of consciousness. So, but that's a metaphysical thing.

[57:33] Michael Levin: All right, in the 4 minutes that we have left, just real quick. So the transmissive business, endogenously in the absence of us applying things to brains. What do you think is being transmitted?

[57:50] Nicolas Rouleau: Well, so it's very likely information, but I don't know what the question is: what is the carrier of that information? I think it's electromagnetic.

[58:02] Michael Levin: But the content, right? So let's say it's electromagnetic, how much your content specificity, how much, I guess, how close are you to the theories of the brain in general as a receiver of, right? Because if you say that, you have to, then, well, what is it receiving and where does that come from, right? So I'm just curious where you're going with that.

[58:23] Nicolas Rouleau: So I don't think that the transmissive model is mutually exclusive. And I think that the productive model can play nice with the transmissive model. And in a follow-up paper to that original essay, I argue that I think that there is a middle ground here where the brain really is doing a whole bunch of physiological things, and you really can just go in and poke the cells, so to speak, and have them do things. But there, I think that in addition to that productive physiology that the brain clearly does, I think that there's also a layer, a functional layer that we haven't really investigated yet, which is transmissive in nature and really places the causal elements of what's going to happen to the cells outside of the brain. And so, if a cell is activated in a neural network, under the productive model, the logical thing to do is just look at all the synapses and just trace backwards, do this kind of retroactive analysis and see where the initial signal came from. But I think that part of what the brain is doing is brain cells are being activated where if you were to interrogate the presynaptic cells, you would find that there was no initiating event that led to that cell being activated. That cell is being activated by an extracerebral source, either Earth's magnetic field or something else. John Eccles thought it was a whole new particle. He thought it was a psychon, right? This particle that when it interacted with the brain, it conferred consciousness. But I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but everything suggests that it's at least interacting with electromagnetic fields and that transmission and production are happening together in the brain.